The Role of the U.S. in the Middle East

Steven Clemons: Ok, ladies and gentlemen, let me tell my crew here, Julian Borger there is an awesome seat here in the bulk room, lots of leg room, if you like, come on up. For those of you who, just come on up, come on up to the front of the room and uh, there are two seats here, unless you don't want to be very comfortable, I would take my offer fast. We're running, there are two more here. I first want to say to you all, thank you very much for joining us. My name is Steve Clemons, I run the foreign policy forums here at the New America Foundation. This is going to be a fun and interesting day and I think people will continue to come in. So I will ask all of you in advance, to show great hospitality for those people who will no doubt be crawling all over you, and for my friend Alan, there are two seats there. And for the staff of New America Foundation, thank you in advance for what you are doing, but please usher people in so that we can get beyond this sort of shyness thing about walking up while people are speaking. We don't care, we want you to come up and take your seat. We obviously, uh, every institution in town is generating its own version of programs focused on what's going on in the Middle East, American stakes in the Middle East and these important policy challenges. We've been very fortunate here at the New America Foundation to uh, recently bring to our team Flint Leverett who is the new director of our geopolitics of energy initiative and a senior fellow in our program. And uh, we've had just recently, a kind of a marriage of opportunity that has gone very well. I'm going to say another few words about my other colleague here just to my right, Michael Tomasky, who many of you know is the editor of the American Prospect where he has worked since September of 2003. Mike wanted to develop a story on basically what was unfolding between Israel and Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, but more importantly, what was going on inside of the thinking of those people on the helm of our foreign policy in the White House. And uh, I'm going to say a few more words about that in a moment, but I think that what Michael helped cultivate as editor of Flint Leverett in this important cover story here, Illusion and Reality: the Case for Negotiations, is something that I think and that I've written about, reads almost like the kind of brief that you would hope someone is giving the President. That it reads, that it has that depth and that style of reading like a Presidential, sort of briefing memo and essentially decision memo in my view. And we can discuss that actively after the fact. But let me invite our partner in today's program, the American Prospect Magazine and Michael Tomasky to say a few words, Mike. Michael Tomasky: Thank you Steve and thanks for having this event and highlighting this piece that I think is very important. I am just here to introduce Flint and I'll be very brief and then I think later in the program, when Steve has to duck out, I'll be filling in as guest moderator. So, I'll try to do that well. You know, I have a staff of young writers at the Prospect and I'm trying to kind of teach them the craft of journalism and the craft of writing and the craft of feature writing and of writing an interesting magazine story and one thing I spend a lot of time talking to them about is their lede as we call it in the business, you know, the first two or three paragraphs that establish tone of the article, they need to establish authorial authority. They need to, those first two or three paragraphs are very important, they need to do a lot of work. I always try to tell them, make it a scene, if you possibly can, give me a scene that has some drama in it, that takes a reader into a place, into a room, into a locale and plants them there and shows them that you were there and that you're telling them with authority what went on in this scene. So when Flint sent me his piece, he sent me an email and the piece was attached and I opened it and I start reading the first paragraph and the first paragraph starts, "On the night of September 11, 2001 I was amongst a small handful of people who were called into Colin Powell's office." I thought pretty good seed, um and it got better from there. I'll just say that when we, when we try always to do thoughtful and agenda setting articles that lay out an agenda that's different from the one that is currently being laid out on Pennsylvania Avenue. And um, when we thought about what was going on in the Middle East, this was back in early July, and thought what was happening in Lebanon and Israel and Gaza and for that matter in Iran and Iraq, we thought, the guy we want to ask to do this piece is Flint Leverett. Flint's vast experience in this administration and then in the Kerry campaign and his vast experience before that as an analyst and an expert in the region, um made him the man to do it and it's a very important piece and we're very thrilled that he did it and Flint thank you and here he is, Flint Leverett. Flynt Leverett: Thank you Steve and thank you Michael and thanks to Bob Cuttner as well at the American Prospect for giving me the chance to do a cover story. Thanks to all of you for coming out on a rainy afternoon, first day back at school. My piece in the American Prospect really starts from a very simple, but I think stark and disturbing analytic judgment on my part. And that is that the most significant strategic trend playing out in the Middle East is a serious and ongoing decline in America's standing in the region. By standing I don't simply mean popularity, although popularity is not unimportant and when I say America's standing is declining a part of what I am talking about is the way that America is perceived and thought about in the region. But there is even a more important component to standing and that is the ability of the United States to be effective in the pursuit of its policy goals and effective in promoting its most important interests in the Middle East. And I really do believe at this point America's standing, defined in that way, is declining at a disturbing pace. On the margins a decline in standing at effectiveness is to some degree, inevitable. If you look for example, at the way a rising power like China, is increasing its own engagement in this strategically critical region, there is bound to be some measure of competition for influence between the United States as the established hegemon, if you will, and China as the rising power. But for the most part, this decline in U.S. standing in the Middle East that I am talking about is really of America's making. Its not the result of exogenous factors, it is of our making. And in particular I think this decline is the result of policy choices made by the Bush Administration in its pursuit of the War on Terror. I am going to talk more about those choices in a few minutes, but I want to say here that there was nothing inevitable about those choices that President Bush made. At every important decision point the President and his national security team had clear alternatives before them and they were alternatives rooted in very, very different sets of analyses, assessments, judgments about how the Middle East works and how America can effectively exercise its power there. In the end, the President made choices on analyses, assessments and judgments about the region, that to put it simply, are not rooted in reality. The President's choices have instead been rooted in ideology , if you will, or if you want to be more generous, a sense of experimentation. Well the results of this experiment are coming in and they are devastating for America's position in the most strategically critical region in the world. Recovery for the United States in the Middle East is certainly possible. I don't think our position is in any way unrecoverable, but it is going to take significant, even profound changes, of course, in American policy. Basically a shift towards policy choices rooted in an accurate understanding of on-the-ground realities of the region and of the requirements for the effective exercise of American power there. That in a nutshell is the main argument of my cover feature for the September issue of the American Prospect. That's what I think are the most important messages in the article and I would like to take a few minutes here to amplify some of those arguments and how some of these arguments, I hope, might start to play out in the political debate here over American foreign policy. As Mike alluded in talking about the opening of the article, I tried to develop my basic arguments that I just outlined for you through the prism of my own experience in the Bush administration. I held two policy-making positions during President Bush's first term in office. During the first year of the administration, I served under Richard Haas on the policy planning staff at the State Department. And then for the second year of the administration, and a little bit into the third year, I moved over to the White House where I served as senior director for Middle East affairs. I would note that I was not a political appointee; I held both of these positions as a non-partisan civil servant on rotation from his home agency, basically George Tenet loaned me first to Colin Powell and then to Dr. Rice. But I would also note, in terms of my personal politics, that I voted for then Governor Bush in 2000. I wanted to see him succeed, I went to work for his administration wanting to help him succeed and after 9/11, I really wanted to help him succeed. I was not in anyway reflexively anti-Bush, anti-Republican or noticeably Democratic in my own political leanings. But I felt compelled by the spring of 2003 to leave the Administration, because I felt that fundamental mistakes were being made in the conduct of American foreign policy. And in the article I try to lay out what I think those mistakes were. On September 11, as Michael eluded in his description of the opening, I was in fact serving on the State Departments policy planning staff. And I was one of a small group of people called back into the building that evening to meet Secretary Powell and work through the night to produce a diplomatic strategy for assembling a coalition that would go after al Qaeda in its sanctuaries in Afghanistan. Secretary Powell took this strategy to the White House on the morning of September 12th and it became the blue print for assembling the coalition that would go to war in Afghanistan and Operation Enduring Freedom launched a couple of months later. In the weeks that followed 9/11, my colleagues and I at the State Department worked to develop what we thought was a comprehensive, diplomatic strategy to support a war on terror. That strategy had several elements. First, we were going to focus on killing al Qaeda in Afghanistan. We then envisioned a sustained global effort to wrap up Bin Laden's operational networks and affiliates in the Middle East and elsewhere. While we embarked on this campaign, we envisioned, serious opportunities for diplomatic engagement with some significant state sponsors of terror, particularly Iran and Syria. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, both Iran and S yria came to the United States and offered various types of assistance to us. With Iran it was assistance focused primarily on getting rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan, rooting out al-Qaeda there and setting up some kind of stable, post-Taliban political structure in Afghanistan. With Syria the offer was basically intelligence on Sunni extremist groups. In both cases we argued that that help should be accepted. But then it should then be used as a basis for engaging those states to persuade them to terminate their own involvement with terrorist groups in exchange for a positive strategic relationship with the United States. We were in fact already embarked on such a diplomatic process with another state sponsor terror, namely Libya. Before 9/11, the Bush administration took a decision in the summer of 2001 to pick up on the diplomatic dialogue that the Clinton administration had initiated with Libya aimed at closing out the Lockerbie PanAm 103 case. That would then lead to the lifting of the U.N. sanctions against Libya and pave the way for a diplomatic process focusing on bilateral concerns that we had with Libya particularly, its weapons of mass destructions activities. The Bush administration took the decision in the summer of 2001, before 9/11 to pick up on that dialogue. I and a number of my colleagues at the State Department, thought that was the right model to engage Iran and Syria in a post-9/11 environment. To say up front, alright, we'll take your help, but we need to have a broader conversation with you and we will tell you up front, if you reverse your own terrorist involvements, here's what you can expect from us in terms of an improved relationship with us. This is the model that eventually produced major break through in US-Libyan relations and we believed that this model could also be applied to effectively to dealing with Iran and Syria. Another element of our strategy was to develop a credible plan for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was, from our perspective, a core political conflict in the region and at a time when the U.S. was going to be conducting military operations in the region when the United States was going trying, in effect, major changes in the region in balance of power, it was critical for U.S. interest and for Israel that the U.S. be seen to have a credible position on the Palestinian issue. And finally, we thought it was important to bolster critical strategic partnerships in the Arab world especially with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. That was, if I can say this, my strategy for the war on terror. I felt it was rooted fundamentally in traditional, realist logic about how the region works and how America can best achieve its goals there. What does realism in this con text mean? I think it means, fundamentally an emphasis on stability. And how do you define stability? Well, I think Henry Kissinger did it very well thirty years ago when he suggested that the aim of American policy in the region should be to marginalize radicals and empower monarchs. Everything that my colleagues and I recommended in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was rooted in that paradigm. We wanted to marginalize the forces of radicalism in the region. We wanted to strengthen forces of moderation in that way. We thought that the U.S. would be able to achieve important strategic goals, not just on the war on terror, but in the region as a whole. And Israel's position in the region would also be made more secure. This kind of logic was not something that we invented on the night of September 11th. The logic, I think, has basically guided American policy in the region for more than thirty years, since Kissinger basically laid it out. Now no administration has ever followed the logic perfectly. No administration is perfectly rational. And I would argue that when administrations over time have experienced major set backs or policy failures or debacles in the region, it comes when they have departed from that logic. But when American administrations have followed that logic, they have been able to do impressive things, Camp David. Over three administrations worked to draw Egypt out of the Soviet orbit, into alliance with the United States and into a peace treaty with Israel. Since the Camp David accords were signed, the United States has been able to exercise power far more effectively in the region than it could without Egyptian support and taking Egypt out of the military region has meant that the kind of generalized Arab- Israeli war that we saw in '67 or '73 has been rendered impossible. Those are real strategic gains. I think that for someone today, the question, the value of the U.S. partnership with Egypt because they don't like certain aspects of Egyptian domestic practice or because they don't think the Egyptian-Israeli peace is sufficiently warm, its truly making the best, the enemy of the good. And for someone to do that, claiming to be concerned about Israeli security in the region, strikes me as just nonsensical if not hypocritical. We felt we were operating in a well-established, time-tested strategic logic that could produce real results on the ground. Now, at, in the initial weeks and months after September 11th, I think we got off to a good start. If you will recall, almost literally the whole world was with us for the military campaign in Afghanistan. There was a serious effort established to root out al-Qaeda on the ground in Afghanistan, a campaign spearhead by joint teams of military special forces elements and CIA paramilitary cadres that was working very well in the initial weeks after we got on ground in Afghanistan. There is also an initial seriousness in the post-conflict policy in Afghanistan. We worked with all of Afghanistan's neighbors, including Iran to set up the quasi government after the Taliban was disposed and we launched an intelligence sharing channel with Syria focused on al-Qaeda. President Bush in November of 2001 went before the U.N. General Assembly and spoke very clearly about the need for a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and spoke quite specifically about the P word, a state called Palestine. If I want to give the President credit for anything in this region during his tenure in office, I think he has basically normalized discourse about Palestine and the two state solution both in the United States and Israel. Now I have other complaints about policy in this area that I will get to, but he has done that and I think that was a real achievement in the post- 9/11, the initial post 9/11 period. I moved to the White House from the State Department in the beginning of 2002 thinking that I would have the chance to implement this strategy that I had helped to devise while I was still serving on the policy planning staff, or at least that was my particular illusion. Um, but during my time at the White House, at every one of the points of this strategy that I laid out, the President chose an almost diametrically opposed direction. This process started really even before I moved over to the White House. In December of 2001 it was decided in an interagency meeting that the notion of putting road maps in front of states like Iran and Syria to say ok, here are the things that we want you to do in order to put yourself out of the terrorism business. But if you do them, we will be prepared to take you off the list of state sponsors of terror. With all that, means for an improved strategic relationship with the United States, because if you do those things, you will be out of the terrorism business as far as we are concerned. It was decided in December 2001 as a matter of policy, that there would be no spelling out of benefits that a state like Iran or Syria could obtain by cooperating with the U.S. in this way. To do so, it was decided, would be in itself a concession to terror and a reward for bad behavior. Um, I always thought that the spelling out of the positive and negative consequences to a state that you always had problems with, I always called that diplomacy. Um, but the administration decided that as a matter of policy, that diplomacy was a reward for bad behavior and we weren't going to do it. Um, we were able to keep the Libya process going, in part because we were doing it with the Brits and therefore it was a little bit harder to back out of once we've gotten started. But we weren't going to apply that model to other cases. Even before I got to the White House you began to see also a turn away from a focus on finishing the job against al-Qaeda. There has been a lot of discussion about the battle at Tora Bora, the reluctance to commit American forces there. Even more striking to me was just shortly after I arrived at the White House in February of 2002, there is a decision taken to pull out those special forces units and CIA paramilitary cadres that were on the ground in Afghanistan rounding up what was left of al-Qaeda. These guys were pulled out because they had unique combinations of operational skills and language capabilities that meant if we were going to war in Iraq on a certain timetable, these guys had to be pulled out of Afghanistan, allowed some time to reconstitute and then put back into the theatre to prepare the battlefield for Iraq. And so these guys were pulled out of the middle of the on the ground campaign to finish off al-Qaeda. This was the reason why in the spring of 2002, when snows melting and mountain passes became accessible Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri and other senior al-Qaeda figures were able to find sanctuary in (unidentified), in Pakistan and its why another group of senior al-Qaeda figures was able to cross the border in the other direction and find sanctuary in Iran. It was because we didn't have the right people on the ground to capture or kill them before they escaped, it's that simple. I wouldn't want to say that the units that were pulled out weren't replaced, that wouldn't be accurate, but they're replacements were units whose language capabilities were in things like Spanish or Russian. And not surprisingly, the effectiveness of the on the ground effort against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan went down after that replace was effective. You also have a real turning away from the Palestinian issue, notwithstanding the President's embrace rhetorically of the two-state solution. Um, people talk a lot about the speech the President gave in June of 2002, the June 24th speech as kind of the blue print for the administration's approach to the Palestinian issue. And I think that speech really is that. But, if you really want to see what was lost, compare that speech to a speech that he gave on April the fourth as he was preparing to dispatch Secretary of State Powell to the region. And Powell went there with the explicit idea tha t he was going to have to deal with, not just establishing a process to get a handle on interrogating security situation, but also to establish a credible political horizon for Palestinians. And I can tell you because I was the NSC representative traveling with Powell on that trip, that during the two weeks that we were gone, the Secretary had the rug pulled out from under him on this point by the White House and the trip came to nothing. We ended up with the June 24th speech, which says two states but doesn't say anything about what is actually required to make a Palestinian state viable. And that was followed up with the roadmap. Another story about the preparation and publication: the roadmap. The roadmap was supposed to be out before the end of 2002, before we actually went to war in Iraq. We promised everyone we would be out before 2002. We promised our moderate Arab allies that, we promised Europeans that, but at the end of 2002 then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, called for early elections in Israel and he sent his chief of staff to the White House, to say don't put out the roadmap before Israeli elections because there are parts of the roadmap that I don't like and I don't want to be in a politically difficult position of looking like I'm opposing and American peace plan before we've had the chance to work out my differences with it. And the decision was taken at the White House to delay putting out the roadmap. And I went in to see Dr. Rice personally on this and explain why I thought this was a big mistake. That American credibility on this issue would not recover if this was the course we took. And she looked at me and said, but if we put it out before Israeli election, we're interfering in Israeli politics. And I said no. If you don't put it out because a particular Israeli politician has asked you not to, that's when you're interfering in Israeli politics. What can I say, that argument was not particular appreciated, um it was one of many arguments that I lost at the White House, but it gives you a sense for where the administration was going on this. And then of course there was the whole democratization idea, which started with the Palestinian issue, but was later generalized to be a kind of a panacea for much of what ails the Middle East. So by the time of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, I felt like every major element of the strategy that I had worked out for the war on terror, the President had decided to go into another direction and to proceed on the basis of an entirely different strategy. So, um, in the end I decided I needed to move on. And I would get to watch the results of this experiment from the sidelines. Well, I've been watching, I think the results are coming in and as I said, I think the results are devastating. I don't think it is correct or appropriate to see the President and his national security team as bungling or incompetent. I think they are actually quite intelligent people with an internally coherent view. Its just a view that rests on very, very different assumptions and judgments about how the Middle East works from my view. That's why I say that what we've been experiencing over the past three to four years, has been a great experiment. But when we look at how this experiment is played out, it has almost literally turned Kissinger on its head. Since September 11th the net effect of U.S. policy in the region has been to empower radicals and put moderates under stress. The Middle East today is more unstable than at any point in the post- Cold War period. There is no evidence to suggest that this instability will give rise to more strong and prosperous region in the future. Look at the trends. With regard to rogue regimes, Saddam may be gone, but Iraq has become a greater source of regional instability than it was in the last years of his rule. Iran's influence is growing and the reigning leadership is increasing inclined to use that influence in ways that work against U.S. interest. Despite the forced withdraw of Syrian troops from Lebanon last year, the Assad regime in Damascus has actually strengthened its grip on power and bolster its support for both Hamas and Hezbollah. The administrations biggest success in taming a rogue regime, namely Libya's renunciation of WMD and ties to terrorist activities was achieved through traditional carrots and sticks diplomacy, the sort I described earlier and it really stands out as an idiosyncratic exception to the larger powered administration's policies. If you look at the democratization the three test cases, the poster children, Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon are all basket cases. Um, I think Hamas' victory and the Palestinian elections in January really invalidated the president's belief that some how a democratically elected Palestinian leadership was going to be less focused on issues like borders territory, status of Jerusalem and more focused on things like picking up garbage and quality of public services. And I still continue to argue that there is no evidence that democracy reduces the incidences of terrorism. And I would in fact argue that there is ample evidence from places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that holding more open elections in most Arab societies would produce governments that are less anti-American and more reformist than incumbent regimes. If you look at the most recent conflict in the Arab-Israeli arena, I think you see a lot of the consequences of the administration's policy choices being played out. Basically you have American standing in decline, you have a loose coalition of radical actors, the external branch of Hamas, Lebanon has Hezbollah, the Assad regime in Damascus and the more hard-line elements of the power structure in Iran who decide that is an opening from them to assert their own agendas by re-radicalizing the Arab-Israeli arena. And once they do that, the United States, because of its policy choices is effectively powerless to put the situation on a more positive trajectory. So if I think this is all then a great experiment and were now seeing the results, again I come back to the idea that the people that advocated these choices and the people who made them, they are not incompetent, they are not bungling. They are people with bad ideas that have been and should be considered discredited by the events, ok. So, now who's going to do the discrediting? Um, I don't think the administration is very likely to discredit it self in any fundamental way. Would love to be proved wrong on that, but I don't anticipate that. And given that I was writing for the American Prospect, um, I want to say a special word of thanks to Mike and Bob Kuttner. Though when I told them that I actually wanted to include as part of my articles something that would make their readership